|mtl|irn Jtilirittitri; 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 



By J. B. WARDLAW, Jr., A. M, 



% ' 



dir' 



% 



^aufh^rn ||i(eratttre — Min ^Uxim nnA mntUohi 




AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 




IW/P...L.. ».ii i'^J 




OF MONTGOMERY COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 



MONTGOMERY WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, JULY 10, 1880, 
By J. B. WARDLAW, Jr., A. M. 



'The voice of any people is the sword 
That guards them, or the sword that beats them down." 

Tennyson. 



PUBLISHED BY THE ASSOCIATION.' 



MACON, GEORGIA.: 

J. W. BuRKE & Co., Stationers, Printers and Binders. 
1880. 



ADDRESS. 

When the invitation to address you on this occa- 
sion reached me, there were good reasons why, with- 
out any unwillingness to serve you, I might have de- 
clined. But when I remembered the cause in the in- 
terest of which the service was asked, I felt that it 
was one of which, as a southern man, I could not 
lightly disobey the summons. For I am one of those 
who believe that the South of the present owes a bind- 
ing debt to the South of the past — a debt that can 
never be ignored as long as courage, love of country 
and sacrifice of self to duty may be reckoned among a 
people's virtues. Belonging with all my heart to the 
new South, and holding by the doctrine that, so far as 
relates to the conduct of public affairs, our duty is one 
of forgetting the things that are behind and pressing 
forward over dead issues to new purposes of national 
life, yet I do not find it in my duty as an American 
citizen, still less in my grateful obligations as a south- 
ern man, to fiiil to bear my part in any just tribute to 
the memory and the motives of them that fell willing 
and illustrious martyrs on the altar of a cause which, 
right or wrong in the eyes of others, was to them the 
cause of country and of civil liberty. 

Gladly and in full sympathy, therefore, I join with 
you in laying the garlands of an undying remembrance 
on these Confederate graves, here in your mountain- 
Westminster of which the walls are these everlasting 
hills, the floor Virginia soil, the dome the blue sky of 



4 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

heaven, the consecration southern heroism, and the 
custodians southern women. 

Bat while no one perhaps could be more stirred than 
I by recalling the spirit of that great struggle which 
gave these graves to your womanly tendance, nor 
linger more lovingly amid the memories of our ruined 
Camelot whose knighthood was broken and scattered, 
and whose glory and strength departed when the 
purest and most puissant captain of his age laid down 
his Excalibur, yet you will pardon me, I trust, when I 
say that I am not here to tell you in florid iterations 
that southern soldiers were brave, that southern 
women were heroic, and that the southern cause was 
not treason. These things are profoundly true, but 
merely to restate them in the phrases of oratory 
would, after all, be no more than to say that courage 
is brave, virtue noble, love of country patriotic. And 
especially I am not here to raise a rhetorical battle 
cry, as has too often been done on occasions like this, 
and call up ghosts of the past that the logic of events 
has bidden down. I would utter no sentiment, arouse 
no feeling in conflict with that wise, catholic and pa- 
triotic spirit of amity which in spite of the desperate 
devices of partizans who seek by every unworthy 
means to maintain a failing grasp of power, is quietly 
but surely pervading the public temper of all good 
citizens of this country. If I should say anything in 
that way it would be to urge, and in the present atti- 
tude of political affairs to urge more hopefully, the 
duty to which in interest, in honour and in patriotism 
we are bound, of doing all that lies in us to obliterate 
sectional animosity, and to speed a cordial and co-op- 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 5 

erative fellow-citizenship which shall make of these 
United States a union indeed, not in name only, which 
self-respecting men of the North and self-respecting 
men of the South can with truth and with pride regard 
as their common country. 

But the theme that I have chosen lies along another 
line of thought, and may claim, I trust, enough of in- 
terest from you to bear the stress of what I have to 
say about a subject which, if it do not belong to the 
Confederacy which is dead, certainly belongs to the 
South which is living. The theme is Southern Litera- 
ture, and if in the treatment of it I prove myself less 
a critic, as is fashionable, than an eulogist and advo- 
cate, as is unfashionable, it must be pardoned to an 
antique veneration of the past, and a sober, but earnest 
hope of the future. ^^Something too much" of preface 
and apology. 

The progress of the American people has been swift 
and broad, but to the thoughtful observer it must 
needs appear unsymmetrical. For, with whatever pa- 
triotic complacency one may regard the amazing strides 
of this young Atalanta of nations in its century-race 
with older civilisations, one cannot overlook the une- 
qual character of the development and its inadequacy 
in certain lines of human endeavour. To be at once 
specific, the utilities have outgrown the finer things 
of life. Our machine shops and factories, and labour 
saving automata are not matched by our art gallaries, 
libraries and universities. The body has out-flourished 
the soul. American progress early had the lines of de- 
velopment cut out for it by the keen utilitarian max- 



6 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

ims of Poor Richard, and the supremacy of Franklin's 
masterful practicality has not yet yielded to the influ- 
ence of any American Ruskin. And so while Europe is 
crying mercy of this breath-taking progress, and while 
we know that the ultra-material extreme is safer, at 
least for national permanence, than the ultra-spiritual 
extreme, some of us cannot help wishing for something 
nearer a golden mean. 

Literature is, perhaps, the department in which 
American genius and effort have realised the least of 
the possibilities, for culture and the creative faculty 
have followed but haltingly the swift advance of a 
mighty material development. The literature that we 
have is not so much American as Bostoaian, at least 
it is largely of New England and the East. If the 
cyclopaedias and manuals are to be trusted, Boston is 
the American Mount Helicon. West of the Hudson, 
your famous author is a rara avis, and to publish south 
of Philadelphia is to have your book fall still-born. 
The sun rises in the East, and sets in the West; the 
South is by the way. 

It is almost unaccountable that the South, which 
has furnished a majority of the leading minds that have 
figured in the history of this country, and which in 
happier days reached, perhaps, a higher mark of cul- 
ture and elegant ease than any other section, should 
have such scanty representation in American letters. 
Edgar Poe has been quoted as saying with his wonted 
bitterness that Pinkney's ^'A Health" would be the 
finest lyric in our literature but for the circumstance 
of the author's living south of Mason and Dixon's line. 
I do not complain in that spirit. As a southern man, 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 7 

I do not grudge Boston her literary supremacy and 
prestige, nor envy the speedier recognition of northern 
writers. Emerson's brave transcendentalisms are as 
catching beside a Georgia hearth-stone as in Faneuil 
Hall, and I can feel the fine fire in Whittier's anti- 
slavery odes as well as in Timrod's trumpet-calls to 
arms. The prejudices and passions of an evil day 
cannot make literature a matter of geography. It is 
above party question. Wisdom is justified of her chil- 
dren; Genius also. It is, then, no part of the present 
purpose to vindicate under-estimated southern writers 
nor pray the favour of the great on unlauded songs of 
the southern muse — time will set that right. The 
purpose is to consider in some sort the status, the 
needs, the possibilities of southern literature. 

Let us tiegin at the beginning, by admitting that 
our southern literature is meagre and insufficient. It 
embodies, for the most part, neither the finest genius 
nor the most earnest and deliberate efforts of the 
southern mind. It is fugitive, occasional, circumstan- 
tial. There has been no established class of literati 
among us making a thrifty use of talents, and our 
greatest minds have looked in other than a literary 
direction, or at best divided their powers between con- 
flicting labours. We have had hardly any authors who 
were authors only, who gave their days and nights to 
literary work as a vocation. Here some busy lawyer 
turns aside from his dusty briefs to write a minor 
poem worth the reading; some tired teacher breaks 
from his dull routine and drops the grammars for a 
draught of the living Hippocrene ; some scholarly 
man of affairs seeks recreation in a translation ; 



8 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

some facile journalist, letting his pen wanton with a 
humorous sketch, "• cleaves the general ear " with 
laughter ; some ambitious graduate vents his eloquence 
and first born theories in a sprightly novel, some poet- 
preacher sets his sermon in fervid verse ; some glow- 
ing orator transcribes his periods in a book ; some fine 
souled woman sings a tender song; and of such, for 
the most part, is our literature. And it is not wholly 
unworthy of us. It is choice of quality, fine of tone? 
and full of suggestive promise, but we cannot but feel 
that it is not enough. Something yet higher in pitch, 
and larger in scope is needed to express the fulness 
of southern life, to voice the aspirations and noble 
thought of the southern mind, to immortalise the lofty 
traditions, the gracious memories and the ancestral 
glories of southern history. As yet no master mind 
of the South has addressed itself to a great literary 
task with that diligent devotion and effectual inspira- 
tion which alone produce literature of the highest sort. 
There is no more jealous mistress than Art. Our 
southern writers have wooed her too carelessly to win 
her highest favour. There has been, for our literature 
at least, an almost fatal division of power. The story 
is still told of a former United States Senator* from 
Georgia, that he made a political speech, argued a case 
in court and preached a sermon the same day — brilliant 
versatility that, to be sure, but it is not in that way 
the mind works out its best. It is honorable, indeed, to 
our people that they seem always to have had the true 
cosmopolitanspirit of that fine saying of Terence : 

" I am a man, and all things human touch me." 
* Walter T. Colquitt. 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 9 

But in too many instances our best minds have 
touched too many things, and while they have " touch- 
ed nothing that they did not adorn," the ultimate 
effect has been a dissipation of power. 

This distinctively southern characteristic has been 
eminently serviceable in one way. It has served to 
create large views of life, and to keep the general 
mind sane, catholic and human to the core. Thus you 
find no more liberal man than the representative South- 
erner. True he holds his traditions and '^ manner- 
born" customs with something of an English tenacity, 
but his mind is always broad enough, and his heart 
always right enough to be reached by worthy appeals. 
And this is the result of our "large discourse," the in- 
terest felt and the actual taking part in everything by 
everybody. Few men are great specialists, but every 
man knows affairs. Scholar, merchant, statesman, 
farmer, lawyer and preacher, can on occasion exchange 
work — the multitude abounds with men. This large- 
ness of life descends to us from the ante-bellum time, 
and is one of its best bequests. 

That old ante-bellum life was a unique thing, one of 
the finest phases of life, worth living and worthily 
lived, of which we have record. We shall presently 
come to consider it as material for a literature to come, 
but the question is at least interesting, why did it not 
produce a literature of its own during the palmy days 
of its existence ? Certainly there were present two 
conditions commonly considered of the first importance 
to literary work, namely, culture and leisure. The 
culture was not of that hyper-refined kind which 
shades off into dilettanteism^ and which is fatal to ere- 



10 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

ation, but large, generous and assimilative, not special 
and critical. Gentlemen read the classics not to trace 
the marvellous flexibility of the subjunctive mood, but 
for the thoughts and beauties of Cicero, of Seneca, of 
Terence, of Homer, of ^schylus, and of Pindar. 
And with that thought, and the best thought of the 
world, southern culture was easily familiar. Colum- 
bia, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans 
had an Athenian society. The South over, luxury, 
refinement, noble manners and culture met you on 
every hand. And the leisure was not an effeminate 
inertia. Certain persons of easy veracity and prolific 
pens, who have ^'done" the South in a few weeks or 
months and turned the dangerous journey to account 
by a sensational and salable sketch of the country and 
people they saw, have delighted to picture the old 
southern gentleman as resting in the intervals between 
slave-whipping, whisky-drinking and other forms of 
dissipation in a sort of hammock-swung ennui, sipping 
mint juleps and fanned by Cuffee and Sambo, vis-a-vis, 
the very apotheosis of laziness. But people whose 
position and character have enabled them to keep good 
company in the South, smile contemptuously at the 
vulgar ignorance and cheap mendacity of the picture. 
The old southern gentleman and gentlewoman were 
lord and lady after a fashion all too rare in this world, 
and intellectual and social life, never among any peo- 
ple in any time, reached a higher level than among the 
noblesse of the South during the first half of this cen- 
tury. The time had its obvious faults, and there were 
weak points in the constitution of that old society that 
could not stand before the avatar of modern progress. 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. H 

Nevertheless it was a life full of power, and of that 
kind of power which we should expect to find venting 
itself in literary expression. But we look in vain for 
any great and lasting literary product of the southern 
mind in that time. A fine minor poem, a choice frag- 
ment, a pleasant bit of travel, a clever sketch, a bril- 
liant essay, an eloquent oration, we find here and there, 
but few by the same hand, all temporary in form and 
written, as it seems, for the nonce. We find no master- 
work of large purpose and satisfying fulness, catching 
and carrying the current of that mighty life. There 
is a reason for this somewhere. Perhaps the pleni- 
tude, the fine reality, the sweet certainty of life ban- 
ished the spiritual hunger that sets its Barmecide feast 
with the ambrosial richness of ideality. They may 
have felt — these brave ancestors of ours — that poetry 
could pitch life no higher, and song could sing it no 
sweeter than it was, and so have been content to live 
it and let who would write it. The noble simplicity 
and outright happiness of their time was not invaded 
by the torturing questions that a prurient and self- 
conscious materialism is asking ours. They did not 
mistrust life, nor tease their souls with a morbid intro- 
spection. They rejoiced in a robust realism. And so 
they may have felt little need to put the joy and glory 
of living into books. 

But perhaps a more practical reason for the dearth 
of literature of their own making among them, is found 
in the general cast and tendency of the Southern mind. 
Its activity ran after affairs. It loved questions at 
issue. Contest was its delight. It was argumenta- 
tive rather than speculative. And this mental predi- 



12 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

lection found its field of exploit in the twin sciences, 
Politics and Jurisprudence. Schoolboys discussed the 
political questions of the day, and were Whigs or Dem- 
ocrats. Politics was the science of sciences, the art 
of arts, the absorbing popular study, and it drew to 
itself the strongest minds and the best genius. Every 
hotel corridor was an open lyceum, every fireside an 
embryonic school of state-craft, every dinner party a 
meeting of political scientists. High questions of 
State were discussed in company as art and philoso- 
phy and the like topics were discussed in other circles. 
Thus all, or nearly all, the best thought went into fo- 
rensic forms. The spoken oration and the political 
debate were the great methods of expression, and in 
them were poured out many an unwritten page of fine 
philosophy, of parliamentary wisdom, of classic elo- 
quence, of genuine poetry. The energy of thought 
was so large that men were reckless of its conserva- 
tion. The earth was irrigated with wine, and only 
here and there a vesselful was caught up to show the 
flavour of the vintage. Men whose uttered wisdom and 
eloquence might have shone on lasting pages are remem- 
bered only as prominent figures in political history, as 
Milton himself, if he had not been brought as much by 
circumstances as by deliberate desire into the rapt se- 
clusion of the scholar and bard, would be remembered 
now only as a secretary of State and a vigorous pamph- 
leteer, instead of the mightiest master but one of the 
English tongue. 

Our literature, then, as we have seen, is inadequate, 
short of the needs and the inspirations of our people. 
Interesting as it might prove to trace further the 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 13 

rational causes of this, it is more pertinent to our pur- 
pose to press another and more important inquiry 
What is the present outlook ? Are we growing, can 
we grow, from the precious seed planted by our great 
and worthy ancestors, a literature that shall at length 
be garnered in immortal sheaves ? I, for one, believe 
that we can, that the seed, the soil, and the season, 
all conspire to produce a noble harvest. The time is 
ripe for the growth of our southern literature, and 
large results await the willing and capable pen. I 
know this is sailing against the wind of current belief, 
or rather, disbelief. A modern school of thought that 
is dinning its analytical criticism of everything into 
ears willing and unwilling has declared against any 
further literary creation, as, indeed, it has declared 
against almost everything worth living for and believ- 
ing in. The human race, it would have us believe, is 
parting with its virility, with its old faiths, its hopes 
and its inspirations, with its purest power. We of the 
present and they of the future are to be critics, not 
creators, agnostics, not believers, passive thinkers, not 
active doers. We are entering upon an Alexandrian 
period of refined and keen-eyed criticism, indeed, but 
of feeble production. Our learned time may produce 
a Theocritus, but never more a Sophocles, a Gray pos- 
sibly, but hardly another Burns. 

But this pessimistic creed some of us have not yet 
learned to adopt, and still believe in the possibility of 
doing something. For such a narrow reading of the 
signs of the times will not hold good against the pos- 
sibilities and the power of human nature, which still 
refuses to have limitations prescribed it. !No great 



14 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

work was ever done, no great genius ever appeared 
but amazed men with a fresh power. Every true poet 
has been the last with the critics till another has come, 
and, after him, another. 

True, this time of ours is a hard one for the man of 
inspirations and large hopes. Culture has it over 
creation ; fact over truth. But the skeptical, critical 
cast of modern thought is merely a shell, inside which 
a vast positive energy is working, and which it will 
presently burst. Reaction is as sequent on action in 
thought as in physics. Old Carlyle, with all his splen- 
did inconsistencies, is right about one thing : power 
will assert itself, and a great man will be great, what- 
ever the wind and weather of circumstances. Doubt- 
less the greatest mind is hindered or helped, limited 
or enlarged in scope by surrounding conditions. But 
the true light will burn through the bushel, and pure 
power will find or fight its way to results. 

All literature has not been written. '' The divine 
creative energy " is neither dead nor dying. I like 
the valorous optimism, transcendental as it is, of Emer- 
son's saying, that perhaps Homer and Milton will be 
tin pans yet. Why should the mighty past paralyse 
us? Let us have the courage of our destiny. 

" The seeds of godlike power are in us still." 

What is literature ? Is it a thing that once done is 
done forever ? Have there been no epics since Homer 
reared the proud and enduring structure of the Hiad ? 
Did Shakspere's matchless dramas end all dramatic 
work ? Are there no songs but Burns's ? Has Words- 
worth fully and finally interpreted nature ? Have 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 15 

Fielding, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and 
George Eliot exhausted, or merely opened up the world 
of fiction ? Have Demosthenes and Burke left noth- 
ing to say in political philosophy ? If it is all done, 
and there is nothing left us but criticism and appro, 
priation, we may as well fold our hands, shut our 
books, and sit down with the moribund pessimists, 
leaving this brave world, our grand ancestral estate, 
to worthier and more puissant heirs. 

But happily we know that literature, like every 
other great enterprise of the human mind, is not a fin- 
ished work, but a living growth to which every age 
and every people must, according to their several abil- 
ity, and on pain of missing life's best, add something. 
Thus there is an ancient, a mediaeval, a modern litera- 
ture ; a Persian, a Greek, a German, an English litera- 
ture. And the literary emergency comes to every 
worthy people. A people's literature is its attempt to 
solve by its best minds its own highest problems, and 
to utter by its best voices its purest inspirations. And 
to every nation, as to every individual, there is a dif- 
ferent point of view. The problems and the inspira- 
tions are the same in general outline, but new condi- 
tions give an infinite variety, and make creation always 
possible. The great mystery of life puts its question 
to every man and to every people afresh. J^ow and 
always remain these high interrogatories of the soul : 
God? Man? Nature? And we must answer for our- 
selves. For me, as an individual soul, what Moses or 
Plato or Wordsworth has spoken cannot wholly suffice. 
For us as a peculiar people, what Hindoo or Hebrew, 
Greek or Englishman has spoken cannot suffice. We 



16 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

ourselves must think and speak on these things. All 
literature has not been written, then, any more than 
all life has been lived. 

But the general proposition that literature is still 
possible, must have a special application to us before 
our case is made out. Let us see if it has any prom- 
ise for us, and if any, what ? 

Every literature, we shall find it useful to remem- 
ber, has a basis in national feeling, has a soil to grow 
in, as surely as the products of the earth. In these 
days when books called literature spring like mush- 
rooms out of every trash-heap, we are too apt to forget 
the conditions of healthy literary growth. No litera- 
ture, however large the genius that speaks through it, 
can be cosmopolitan and general in its origin and de. 
velopment, but must have its beginnings and growth 
in special soil, of which it will always bear the flavour.- 
And a national feeling has been the most fruitful soi 
in which literature has yet grown. Greek literature 
is one thing, English literature is another, and south- 
ern literature, we may at least hope, is going to be 
another. If we read Pindar understandingly, we 
must in so far become Greek, if Goethe, German. 
Even the greatest masters that we are wont to think 
of as above the common voices and belonging to all 
time : Homer, Dante, Shakspere, are not wholly cos- 
mopolitan. One is Greek and ancient, one is Italian 
and mediaeval, and one is English and modern. Thus 
all great thought has at once a peculiar and a univer- 
sal, a national and an international side. 

Any literature, therefore, that may be produced in 
the South, cannot be a mere extension of English lit- 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 17 

erature. It will be either a southern literature or no 
literature at all, but the passing echoes of a day. 

An analysis of southern thought and character 
will show that we are a peculiar people with a unity 
of feeling as strong as any national or caste feeling. 
The word Southerner, carries with it as distinctive 
traits and characteristics as the word Frenchman, or 
German. Born of a stock that planted itself with like 
vigour and purity no where else out of its island home, 
bred under separate and unique conditions, we are by 
birth, by rearing, by growth, as well as by climatic and 
other physical influences, a peculiar people; And all 
this has taken shape in a strong and coherent southern 
feeling. Take, by way of illustration, our civil war. 
The southern states were as one, and the same spirit 
prevailed every where from Maryland to Florida. Never 
was there exhibited a deeper and more genuine national 
feeling; and it was not the outgrowth of a mere con- 
federation of states on a basis of common interest, nor 
was it produced by the personal magnetism of great 
leaders. The confederation of the states, and the uni- 
versal rush to arms with the same purpose and spirit 
were the results, the phenomena of a deep-rooted and 
wide-spread organic southern unity. The war was a 
manifestation of it only, not its origin ; it existed as 
strongly before as during the war, and the " Solid 
South " of contemporaneous politics — the solidarity of 
southern political sentiment and action in the interest 
of a just and wholesome home rule — is another phase 
of the same thing. But this southern feeling is not 
merely hereditary tradition, not merely confederate 
feeling, not merely the product of the reconstruction 



18 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

era. It is something broader than these, it is an ethnic 
passion, a community of life and of thought that no 
mere political or other coalition could effect, forming the 
southern States into a union within the Union. 

Taking, then, our southern national feeling as a 
thought-soil, what growth may be expected ? It chances 
to open to us a field of literature both in the past and 
in the future. Backward our traditions bind us to the 
old southern civilisation, which ought to prove an 
almost inexhaustible store of treasure. Already it 
looms behind us as our heroic past, and the sharp shock 
that divided it from our present life makes it seem now 
as distant across a chasm of two decades as if it were 
across a chasm of two centuries. The range is long 
enough for literary perspective, and the genius of 
that old southern life, as it touches and holds us by 
its traditions and memories, and is still an integral 
part of our life, is just such matter as the fine hand of 
faithful and loving appreciation may in this changed 
aftertime shape into an enduring literature. 

How now does that heroic age affect us? Not mourn- 
fully, for it were unphilosophic, if not unmanly, to be- 
wail the passing of that broad-acred system of life. 
In the development of our people such a change was 
necessary to a fuller growth. The passing of that old 
order was a destruction wrought not by sword and pol- 
itics alone. It was a necessary step of the ^'Time- 
spirit," that invisible divinity which moves with majes- 
tic gait through the ages, demolishing proud structures 
only to build in their place prouder. Or better, God 
was the destroyer who in the path of his destructions 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 19 

ever upbuildeth. For in the midst of death we are 
also in life. 

But how can we best preserve to our life as a peo- 
ple the noble things bequeathed to us from that per- 
ished past? How may we so infuse the large and 
lofty spirit of that ancestral life into our present life 
as to retain all its good ? How, we may ask, have 
other peoples carried across revolutions the spirit of 
their ancestors, and' transmitted it to posterity ? By 
shaping it into a literature. Every nation that has 
had an heroic age has built a literature on its tradi- 
tions, and no nation has a literature of any worth ex- 
cept those that have had an heroic age. 

Every circumstance attending the change from the 
old South to the new, makes the old a fit subject for 
literary art. Consider, for example, how differently 
a like change has been wrought among us and among 
the English. Practically the battle has been the same 
in England and in America, Radicalism against Con- 
servatism. But in England the ascendency of Radi- 
calism has been gained by slow and hard contested 
steps. The old English nobleman has been gradually 
merged into a commoner, so gradually, indeed, that 
there is no pathos in the change. He has but yielded 
to the slow, grinding logic of events. But the south- 
ern nobleman was one day taking his ease in his an- 
cestral halls, feeding his fancy with proud memories 
and dreaming grandly of the lasting existence of his 
order. The next day his ancestral portraits were torn 
from his ruined walls, his household gods destroyed, 
and he emerged from the blinding smoke and the deaf- 
ening din of an illstarred strife to find himself only a 



20 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

proscribed American citizen. His present existence 
is the greatest fact in modern political history — citi- 
zenship of a mighty republic, but his former existence 
is still the proudest and teuderest of recollections. In 
this change there is pathos and the "promise and po- 
tency" of a noble literature. 

Who, then, in prose or in verse, in song or in story, 
shall catch and fix in forms of beauty and of power 
the old for the inspiration and growth of the new ? 
Consider the old Southerner, what manner of man he 
was — lord of his castle and estate, not altogether un- 
like an Odysseus in his Ithacan kingdom. He was 
the latest, as he will be the last, fine figure of feu- 
dalism. On his estates grew the staple that was 
king of commerce. For the furnishing of his house- 
hold needs all climates and civilisations were taxed. 
And he was a broad man, comprehensiveness was his 
dominant characteristic. He was broad-acred in lands, 
broad-hearted in hospitality, broad-minded in thought — 
a man on a large scale who 

" Bore without abuse 
The grand old name of gentleman, 
Defamed by every charlatan, 

And soil'd with all ignoble use." 

And his queenly mate, the southern woman, with a 
Greek-likeness of beauty, a fineness of culture, a dig- 
nity of breeding, a power of purity, a sweetness of 
heart, a loftiness of soul unsurpassed iii history or 
fiction — who shall picture their splendid eminence for 
our needy time ? The world has given us no such 
rich material, no such fine figures for literature these 
many barren years. 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 21 

And the old slave life, not in its exceptional bar- 
baric phases, but in its peculiar trusting and pathetic 
temper, in its reciprocal confidences, and in its harm- 
less pride is worthy of lasting remembrance. And 
remembered it will be by the posterity of both races, 
when the incendiary fanaticism and abolition pamph- 
lets that did it such unjust violence, are fallen in the 
muck-heaps of time. 

It goes without the saying that no other than a 
southern hand can work out these things. The fine 
spirit of the old life eludes in its subtle essence the 
grasp of a foreign hand. Some southerner must do 
for the South, what Sir Walter, a Scotchman, did for 
Scotland, and what he could not have done, if his muse 
had been born and educated among the fogs of London 
instead of among the heaths and cliffs and lochs of 
Scotland. And the old life of the South may yet 
stand out as fairly in our chronicles of that time as 
the Scotland of the Waverly novels, which Sir Walter 
never saw, but knew^ shines on his immortal pages. 
Let our ^Svizard of the South" arise. 
. Take, too, our war, what noble material it offers a 
literature ; not its political and constitutional ques- 
tions. They are settled once for all, and the South 
has accepted the settlement with a thorough and 
hearty good faith which declines ex post facto discus- 
sion. But the sublime exhibitions of courageous pa- 
triotism, the glad obedience to duty, the Spartan self- 
sacrifice, the splendid endurance, the stirring vicissi- 
tudes, the awful tragedies, the heroic acceptance of 
defeat that it developed, what themes are these to kin- 



22 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

die the times to come with their shining lessons ! In 
that mighty struggle — 

" When the ranks were rolled in vapours, and the winds were laid with sound " 

our southern national feeling manifested its purest 
and greatest phases, and sealed its devotion with its 
best blood. And the record is yet to be written. For 
mighty deeds do not stop to give an account of them- 
selves. Achilles did not chronicle his exploits, and 
Lee has left us no autobiography. While here and 
there lyrics that will live burst from surcharged souls, 
and gave hasty expression to the principles that 
swayed men like a tempest of the gods, it has been 
left to us to preserve in enduring forms the memora- 
bilia of that great epoch. Ours it is to hand down to 
the new South the rich bequests of the old. The 
question of victory or defeat, of gain or loss of cause, 
counts for nothing, provided defeat do not mean total 
destruction of strength. For a greater gain than the 
victories and conquests of war, and more than com- 
pensating for all losses, as a dozen historical parallels 
will show, is the stronger and surer knitting of the 
people in a common unity. A strong and virtuous na- 
tional feeling is worth more than victory, and more 
than men and wealth, at least for the greatest of all 
work, the upbuilding of a people's thought, and the 
ennobling of a people's life. 

Backward, then, to these rich fields our national 
spirit leads for literary growth. But the future points 
to other and different opportunities. For what are 
the special characteristics of our southern national 
feeling ? As a people we distinctively have Reverence 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 23 

and Conservatism. We have a reverence for God, a 
reverence for Law, a reverence for man and his rights. 
The voice of the scoffer is little heard, and less re- 
garded throughout our whole land. The disintegrating 
influences of modern skeptical thought have not yet 
got at work among us. Isms do not flourish in our 
soil. Our conservatism refuses to pipe to the mad 
dance of the times. While the societies of Europe 
and of even other sections of this country are under- 
mined by rampant forms of communism, our body so- 
cial remains undisturbed. Our masses do not mutiny 
against law and established order. Strikes, and riots 
are unknown. And while this cultured generation is 
elsewhere framing artistic prayers to an " Eternal not 
ourselves" or asking unanswerable questions of the 
*' Unknowable," everywhere in our land there are 
earnest men and women reverently thanking God for 
rain and sunshine, seed-time and harvest, and " into 
every corner of whose homes shines the light of God 
by day and by night." Belief is not yet become obsolete 
or irrational. 

Let us look toward religious thought, the basis of 
all healthful literature, and see what the reverential 
spirit of our people may lead us to do in that way. 
In religious thought it is a stormy day the world over-— 
the wide world from which our quiet life seems so far 
removed. The old landmarks of faith are gone and 
going. The creeds of Christendom are laughed at by 
men who rest under no other suspicion of being irra- 
tional. The leaders even of christian religious thought 
are many of them putting on the strange liveries of 
new gods, and forsaking the paths of the ages for 



24 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

broader and shorter ones thai lead every way, indeed, 
but nowhither. Faithlessness has made aimlessness 
of life, xin 'immense ennui" is settling down on 
individuals and nations, and earnest and capable men 
are seriously discussing whether life be worth living. 
Men plunge mind-length into the whirling centres of 
modern thought, and lose their heads in the dizzy 
round, till their eyes darken on the fair earth around 
them and on the sweet heavens above them, and the 
cheerless, inclement darkness of doubt closes them 
about. What does it all mean ? Not that men will 
forsake religion, nor that the mighty religious tendency 
of the human mind is losing its force. It is only a 
time of doubt, and many a time of doubt has come in 
the history of faith, from which men have emerged 
into a faith yet stronger and clearer. For the religious 
faculty is imperishable and perennially active. But a 
time of doubt does always work one great evil, and 
that is the loss of reverence. As long as a healthful 
reverence for the beautiful, the good an,d the true, for 
God and the manifestations of God in man remain, we 
are safe, let creeds change as they may. Reverence 
is the need of our time, and of all times, a reverence 
that is broader and deeper than any special creed, such 
a reverence as in one form or another, has always been 
the basis of religious thought and literature. Now 
while this religious revolution is working, some land, 
some people must stand out as a light, must bear the 
ark of the covenant, and it will be that people in whom 
abides the deepest and most intelligent reverence. 
Even in these two thousand years, the home of the 
leading religious idea of the world has changed often, 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 25 

and always to that land and people which had the most 
healthful spirit of reverence. First it was Judea, then 
Rome, then Germany, then Scotland, then England, 
and why not now our South ? In every land but ours 
good and wise men are mourning the decay of rever- 
ence, of the religious spirit. With us it is still earnest 
and strong. It is a dazzling thought, but why is not 
heaven and the divine source of saving truth as near 
us as it was to Luther, to Knox or to Wesley ? Why 
may not the voice crying the ways of the Lord in a 
modern wilderness of unbelief come from among us ? 
Why may not faith find her surest stronghold in our 
land ? The chance surely is as much ours as any 
other people's. Let our religious thinkers look to it. 
We have as yet done but little toward building up 
indigenous religious thought; we have hitherto adap- 
ted foreign helps to our needs. But now is our oppor- 
tunity to assert our religious individuality and power, 
to utter convictions and thoughts for the healing of 
the nations, to breathe upon the dry bones of contro- 
versial theology, and pour oil upon the troubled mare 
magnum of skeptical science. 

And if the reverential spirit of our southern feeling 
gives us a chance to build a native literature, not less 
beneficent in another direction is southern conserva- 
tism. In political thought and governmental policy it 
must hold a strong and eminently serviceable hand. 
Many sagacious students of our national politics see 
in southern conservatism the surest balancing power 
against an ultra-republicanism. And such a counter- 
actant is needed. For our republicanism is rapidly 
drifting at one extreme toward the communistic inter- 



26 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

pretation of " all men are free and equal," and at the 
other toward a dangerous centralization. And these 
tendencies, antipodal as they are in theory, are prac- 
tically playing into each other's hands. Radical thought 
expresses itself in radical action and reaction. The 
South is law-abiding and conservative. No part of 
this country is more devoted both in letter and in 
spirit to the constitution, and the unwritten law of 
conservatism, of sound citizenship, is as strong and 
sacred with us as the lex non scripta of England. In 
giving expression to this great and wholesome ten- 
dency of political thought, in embodying and preserv- 
ino- the invincible spirit of southern conservatism, we 
shall make no mean contribution to modern pohtical 
literature, and do the Republic itself a service. 

But besides this we have room and demand for other 
immediate and vigorous political thought. Important 
and pressing questions of government and of society 
await solution at our hands. Notable among these is 
the race question of white and black. What is to be. 
the final result here? What the reciprocal action of 
the races ? Can the negro be made a safe citizen, and, 
if he can, how? Gratuitous suggestions and ready 
made solutions pour in from foreign quarters where the 
problem is not understood. But we of the South, and 
we only, have the working out of the matter. It is 
our task alone to elevate the ignorant and helpless 
negro to the highest political and social plane within 
his capacity, and set his feet in the way of worthy 
ends. And the problem and our solution of it are not 
without great significance to this country and to the 
Science of Government. For the question of modern 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 27 

politics is whether republicanism, toward which all the 
nations are drifting, be really the ultimatum of human 
government. Certainly our experiment in the South 
will have a voice in the answer. For if we, with the 
burden of an ignorant, irresponsible, unthinking major- 
ity, the prey of charlatanism, incorporated into our 
body politic, secure and maintain permanently the 
purity of republican institutions, the success of repub- 
licanism will be assured. No people can thereafter 
doubt the possibility of free government. 

Some may think that these political problems hardly 
belong to the question of literature. But if, as has 
been truly said, the literature of republics is largely 
oratorical and political, the literature of the South has 
been and must continue to be pecuHarly so. 

For in the matter of building up political thought, 
we inherit peculiar capabilities, if not a popular genius, 
as in this particular field we inherit, also, a literature 
that is among the very best achievements in letters of 
our western world. Old Patrick Henry and Calhoun 
may be read in company with Demosthenes and Burke. 

These, then, are the richer and more promising 
fields that are ours for literary cultivation, an heroic 
past and the fortunate temper of our thought toward 
the religious questions, and the political problems of 
the immediate future. But over and above these there 
is another direction in which we may look, not with 
certainty, indeed, but still with something of reason- 
able hope. Has all poetry been written, and if not, 
have we anything to expect in that way ? Here in 
truth we come to a doubtful range of prediction, so 
delicately elusive, so exquisitely shy and surprising is 



28 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

the Muse. We will not fall into the fallacy of a popu- 
lar philosophy, and argue the necessity of the poet 
from the appropriate environment. But we may at 
least repeat the question that a great English student 
of poetry asked some years ago. Nearly every strong 
and peculiar people that has lived in a land where 
nature has been joyously bountiful and luxuriant has 
articulated its poetic interpretation of the great out- 
door world, ^^and now," he asked, "why may we not 
hope for a phase of poetry of nature from the south- 
ern states of America?" And why not? Nature 
speaks the same speech to no two peoples, smiles alike 
on no two lands, and she has dealt bountifully with us. 
May not her special revelations to us, striking on our 
peculiar temperament, find a new and noble utterance ? 
If the leaf of Henry Timrod's genius had not " per- 
ished in the green " — the pity of it — his pure, strong 
voice might now be answering this question amid the 
" immemorial pines " of his Carolina. 

I confess to a lively faith in our literary future, if 
only we are true to ourselves as a people, and turn to 
account our inspirations and opportunities. But we 
must rouse ourselves to a sense of our literary needs, 
and enlist our best efforts in the development of our 
literary resources. I trust it would be a superfluous 
argument to accent the importance of such a develop- 
ment. We all know the high uses of literature, gar- 
nering, as it does, the only treasures of earth that 
moth and rust cannot corrupt, and furnishing, for the 
most part, the food on which, as individuals and as a 
people, we grow wiser and greater. It is at once 
cause and consequence of the noblest civilisation. 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 29 

Who doubts that Goethe has done more to advance 
Germany in the rank of nations than Bismarck, that 
Tennyson has done more for the weal of England than 
any premier of his time ? Fletcher of Saltoun's fam- 
ous saying about making the songs of a people and 
letting who would make the laws, is founded on a deep 
truth of sociology. In the South we need a general 
revival of letters, an all-pervading intellectual awaken- 
ing. Let the large earnestness and the productive 
energy of our people look beyond mere material pro- 
gress to the things that endure. We want our rail- 
ways built, our mineral resources developed, our lands 
improved, our cities populated, and all that. These 
things will make us richer, and we are not yet become 
eifete through the enervating influence of excessive 
wealth. But if we would become wiser and stronger, 
if we would give scope to the souls of us, if we would 
fulfil the destiny of a great and virtuous people, we 
inust look to a mental and spiritual commerce, to a 
development within, as well as without to work our 
will. There must be an intellectual demand which 
shall call forth its supplies from our own productive 
power. There must be a wider diffusion of culture, a 
wider appreciation of the "life which is more than 
meat." The popular mind must feel a concern about 
education, books, poetry, sculpture, all high art and 
thought. After reasonable food and raiment and a roof 
overhead, every family should have a library according 
to its ability. Men ought to see that a book may be 
worth more than a gold mine, a song more than an 
invention. We need better equipped schools, greater 
educational endowments, larger rewards for brain- 



30 SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 

work, more publishing facilities, a better book trade, a 
larger, an hundred fold larger number of readers. For 
a literature requires readers as well as writers. We 
must support with our money, with our intelligent 
appreciation, and, whenever and wherever possible, 
with our own efforts whatever makes for a worthy 
literary development. After the war the question of 
bread and butter and of the liberty to earn and use 
it in peace was the practical, pressing issue, but that 
pressure is relaxed. The South is awake and at work, 
and is coming " up to the times" in industrial advance- 
ment quite as fast as is wholesome. The greatest need 
of our people now is of political economy, of mental 
science, of ethics, of history, of fiction, of poetry, of 
art — of a large and fruitful culture, not the adulterate 
eclecticism that is a modern counterfeit of it. We 
must make reading clubs and lyceums more popular 
with the young than the German. We must have a 
library wherever there is a corporate town. We must 
make our colleges the people's institutions. We must 
make our newspapers educative, vehicles of thought 
and information traveling everywhere in the public 
interest. We must beget a greater dignity of citizen- 
ship, a profounder sense of responsibility, both in indi- 
vidual and in community. We must get the ichor of 
a larger intellectual life at work in our veins, and 
learn to estimate spiritual values. We must possess 
ourselves of " the best that has been thought and 
said " by the wise and great of the ages. We must 
learn and speak with one another the language of 
the flowers, the birds, the stars. " Speak to the earth 
and it shall teach thee." 



ITS STATUS AND OUTLOOK. 31 

But let us remember, what we have already seen, 
that if we would come into lasting greatness as a peo- 
ple, especially if we would produce a worthy litera- 
ture, the prime condition is that we 'Ho our own selves 
be true." Our development must be indigenous, along 
the line of our national characteristics and race pro- 
clivities. We cannot import thought, we cannot copy 
a literature that will give us growth. We are a dis- 
tinct people with problems of our own, of which we 
can neither borrow the solutions nor transfer the re- 
sponsibility. We cannot build on an English, nor on 
a German, nor on any foreign foundation, but must lay 
our own deep in our national life. Out of our own 
soil we must derive our sustenance, out of our own 
souls proceed the everlasting things of life for us. 

Our own thought must not be eclipsed by our cul- 
ture, our methods of life must not be nullified by any 
imitation however ambitious. 

Rich and ennobling indeed is the study of the heroic 
past of the Greeks, filled with demi-gods whose Titanic 
figures are cast in a matchless literature, but let us not 
forget that our own life rests on the background of a 
knightly chivalry. We may dwell with kindling aspira- 
tion on the saving truths uttered by ancient bard and 
prophet, but let us remember that we ourselves have a 
work to do for truth. The conditions of statecraft in 
ancient empires and republics may give us lofty study, 
but we ourselves have harder and higher political prob- 
lems than Greek or Roman or Englishman. We mu^e 
how the waves of the many-sounding Aegsean symbol- 
ised for Sophocles man's infinite yearning and the rest- 
less flow of human life, but on our own shores break 



32 SOUTHERN LITERATURE. 

waves as many-sounding and as suggestive as on sterile 
Attica. We read that the muses dwelt on Mount Olym- 
pus, but our own mountains shame Olympus and are 
as many-fountained as Ida. Sweet and fragrant to 
our fancy bloom the fields where Burns plowed and 
sang. Consider our own fields — what Scottish heath 
is arrayed like one of these ? 

Life with all its suggestiveness, with all its myste- 
ry and with all its primal power is in us and about us. 
And man is still great enough and the world still 
young and rich enough for us to win from its fair wide 
fields fresh supplies for our immortal needs. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
III 




017 166 508 5 



